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Life coaching 101: Parenting
What parenting has to do with life coaching?
A lot, indeed.
Let’s check out some areas where life coaching can make a difference in your life as a parent.
Personal development
Parenting opens up a whole new universe 😊 Skills we never thought we have we are using, and phrases we swore a thousand times we would never say slip our lips. Yepp. Parenting can be a continuous personal development journey if we are keen. It cannot work without self-awareness and self-reflection. And while we sometimes feel like failures, we can hold on to the journey we have already passed since we have started.
Leadership effectiveness
Parenting might be one of the most challenging leadership roles we ever fill while the most rewarding. Seeing our children navigate life with skills we helped develop can bring tears into our eyes and joy into our hearts. Also, this is the role in which we must learn to manage our emotions, walking away from emotionally heated arguments, and keep our mouths shut.
Conflict resolution
As our children grow, they are more and more keep testing the boundaries. And each time, we find ourselves in a conflict. How are your conflict resolution skills? What has been your best win-win with them? Which one was that left you with the most horrible feelings? Which one is the one you wish you could travel back in time and change?
Relationships
How does your team of “co-workers in parenting” does?
It’s tough, isn’t it? Full of unexpected turns? The ability to adjust is a must-have in every family relationship.
Read more here: Family relationships
Time management
How to manage “work-family-life balance”? How to allocate enough time for self-care and how to do it without feeling guilty? The time-management issues are causes or symptoms of something else?
toxicity is toxic – and is painful
Toxic workplace
Have you ever worked in a toxic workplace? I have.
Interestingly, the problem wasn’t with my colleagues or boss. It was another department with whom we shared the office. It was their culture that made me sick. The tone of the language around me 8 hours a day made me physically unwell: it was too contradictory to my values. Each day I was dragging myself to work with a knot in my stomach, feeling nauseous, hoping one day somehow it would turn better.
Then I realised I couldn’t change them. And I didn’t want to give up my values.
It has become my shortest job.
Toxic positivity
There is no healing without seeing and acknowledging the bad stuff.
Therefore, seeing only the positive means denying the truth. It is hurtful.
However, I would be careful to call out someone’s toxic positivity.
They might be using it to soothe their own pain. I have been there. I had times in my life when clinging to looking at the “bright side of life” was the key to my emotional survival. It wasn’t others telling me, but I was telling myself.
Read more here: emotional abuse impacts our physical health
Family relationships
Relationships within a family is a tricky thing.
Especially if it’s loaded with parenting.
For a first look, it seems to be pretty easy: an equal partnership between the spouses (“co-workers”) and parents guiding their children (kind of “leader – subordinate”).
However, as time passes by, children are growing, both types of relationships need to adjust to changes occurring.
First of all, we all change over time, at least a bit. So, our partner likely needs to adjust to us, just as we need to change to fit them. Also, the challenges as a team of co-workers in parenting we face, well, let’s say, might get more unpredictable as our children grow into their teenage years. It means that our usual problem-solving methods might not work anymore, i.e. we need to change.
Secondly, as our children grow, we try to give them more choices to make and through this, they can learn to make decisions and bear consequences.
We must never forget,
the day will come when they leave to have their own life, even their own family.
We cannot stay forever beside them and make all the decisions for them like when they were toddlers. We should not even think of that. The best we can do is to nurture them up to be responsible adults. And then let them go. Although they are forever in our hearts, only temporary guests in our home. Even if temporary, in this case, means two decades 😊.
Thirdly, our relationship with our parents is changing. First, we left their home. Whether they let us go or still cling to us, we need to find our place. Having a spouse likely challenges the connection with our parents. Now there is another person in our lives we listen to. Some parents can get pretty upset about losing control over their children’s lives. Then, when our children are born, our parents become grandparents. And it can open up another Pandora’s box over parenting (ours vs theirs and who knows it better), boundaries (they’re first and foremost are OUR children, and, by the way, our parents’ grandchildren), and a lot of other unexpected issues. Not every grandparent is an angel. Unfortunately, some would love to control our family.
Drawing that firm line in the sand can be a real emotional struggle for us. Those couples who stick together in it, I believe, are more likely to succeed. And it is another challenge to their relationship as a couple.
How does your “co-worker team in parenting” cope with it?
#lifecoaching #change #family #relationships #parenting #boundaries #life-coach-andrea